Fire in the SkyS


Meteor

Honduras Investigates Alleged Meteorite Crash


Prensa Latina
Mon, 20 Aug 2012 21:40 UTC
El Paraiso
© Prensa Latina
Tegucigalpa - Specialists with the Permanent Contingency Commission (COPECO) are now in Trojes area, in the eastern Honduran department of El Paraíso, to investigate the alleged crash of a meteorite.

According to the inhabitants of that region near the border with Nicaragua, a fireball crossed the sky on Saturday night and then they heard a loud explosion.

A COPECO statement clarified that no specialized agency reported a meteorite passing by the Central American region, nor has reported the loss of an aircraft.

Copeco and the astronomical observatory of the National Autonomous University of Honduras said their experts in the field are investigating what happened in that region and will report as soon as possible, while they called on people not to generate speculation to avoid uncertainty
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Meteor

Very slow-moving fireball breaks apart over Japan


sheilaaliens.net
Sun, 19 Aug 2012 08:39 UTC
Filmed from four all-sky cameras in Japan, August 19th, 2012.

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Meteor

Large meteorites found after fireball lands in Manitoba, Canada

Robin Booker
Brandon Sun
Fri, 17 Aug 2012 09:33 UTC
A woman living near Riding Mountain believes she found meteorites close to her home.

On Wednesday, she found two fragments with surfaces like "old elephant skin," one the size of a football, the other larger, weighing about 25 kilograms.

In the middle of the night on Tuesday, Nicole Nixon's house suddenly became bright and there was a loud bang. She thought something hit the house.

"It was a terrifying experience. At first I thought it was a bomb," she said.

In the morning, Nixon went outside to find her horses cut, likely from hitting barbed wire after being spooked.

While walking through her property looking for the cause of the ruckus, she found what she believes to be two meteorites lying on shale rock.
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Meteor

Overhead cometary explosions? Blasts in southern Israel blamed on phantom rockets


Russia Today
Fri, 17 Aug 2012 05:37 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo/Jack GuezIsraeli emergency personnel stand around wondering what caused the explosions. No impact sites and no rockets were found.
Israeli officials suspect that two large explosions that rocked the Israeli city of Eilat may have been the result of a rocket attack. Authorities are currently scouring the area for evidence of a Grad missile strike.

­The explosions hit Eilat near the city's border with Egypt's Sinai Peninsular on Wednesday evening, and were felt throughout the city. No casualties were reported.

"We heard two loud explosions. It was really scary, last time this happened the entire house shook," Eilat resident Rotem told Israeli newspaper Ynet.

"People on the street just froze in their tracks. It was frightening. Maybe it's time that sirens are installed in Eilat as well," said another resident of Eilat.

Several rockets have been fired at Eilat this year, which Israeli authorities believe were launched from neighboring Sinai by Islamist militants.

Comment: Note that they found no impact sites and no rockets. Meanwhile war preparations against Iran are being hyped to the max again:

Israel media talk of imminent Iran war push

Israel ready for 30-day war after Iran strike

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Attention

Best of the Web: Meteorite starts fire in Itatiba, Brazil following separate Fireball incident in neighbouring Campinas days earlier


Correio Popular
Wed, 01 Aug 2012 14:17 UTC
Translated by SOTT.net reader

After reports of an alleged fall of a fireball associated with a meteor shower over the weekend in Campinas, now it's Itatiba's turn to be subject to searches for evidence of meteorite fragments. The suspicion is that this object may have crashed into someone's property in the city last Monday. Astronomer Julio Lobo was on location throughout the day yesterday and believes this hypothesis, especially given the characteristics of the fall witnessed by the caretaker of a property. After Correio published a story about the fireball, the editorial staff has received six e-mails from readers reporting that they saw this very bright event. The astronomer explained that the phenomena in Campinas and Itatiba have no relation with each other, but the two incidents indicate that the sky is "busy."

According to the caretaker Jose Oliveira dos Santos, 52, on Monday afternoon, around 2.30 pm, he heard a noise like a jet and then a strong thump on the ground a few meters from his house, on the hill. "There's a flight corridor here, but this buzz was different. It was a sort of whistling at a rapid speed and then it diminished, with a very strong noise. I saw nothing, only listened. After the crash, I saw the fire and immediately phoned the owners of the grange," he said. For the astronomer, this account is considered "classic" of cases in which meteorite falls have been recorded, such as in the city of Varre-Sai, Rio de Janeiro, two years ago. Besides the information of the witness, Lobo listed other evidence.
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Meteor

NASA Photographed and Measured the Orbits of Nearly 300 Perseid Fireballs


SpaceWeather
Tue, 14 Aug 2012 18:38 UTC
Earth is exiting the debris stream of Comet Swift-Tuttle, source of the annual Perseid meteor shower. According to the International Meteor Organization, the shower peaked on August 12th with ~120 meteors per hour. NASA's network of all-sky meteor cameras photographed and measured the orbits of nearly 300 Perseid fireballs:
Perseid Fireballs
© NASA
In the diagram, above, the location of Earth is denoted by a red splat. The orbit of parent comet Swift-Tuttle is traced in purple. The comet itself does not intersect Earth (good thing), but many of its meteoroids do hit our planet.

"The plot contains data from July 26th to the present," says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "There are 289 fireballs, 183 on peak night alone." To illustrate the intensity of the shower, Cooke offers a composite image of all the fireballs over the Marshall Space Flight Center on August 12th. "It was a great show."

For more snapshots from around the world, browse the Realtime Perseid Photo Gallery.
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Meteor

Large Fireball Blazes Across Northwestern US

Mike Irwin
The Wenatchee World
Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:20 UTC
Flaming meteor? Disintegrating satellite? Plunging plane? Crashing comet? Here's the one thing known for sure about the huge fireball that on Aug. 7 zoomed across North Central Washington's night sky: a lot of people saw it.

"You can bet thousands of folks witnessed the event," said lifelong sky watcher Tom Forker, who saw the blazing ball from his home in Winthrop. "I've seen reports on it from around the Northwest."

Following a Wenatchee World story last weekend, dozens of local observers posted online their gee-whiz accounts of the bright, fiery object. Most reported it whooshed west to east around 10 p.m., with many describing flames, sparks and a comet-like tail flashing a kaleidescope of colors.

Many observers, in locations stretching from the Cascade crest east to Libby, Mont., also noted on sky-watch websites that the fireball was the largest night-sky object they'd ever seen.

"A lot of people said they'd never experienced anything like it," said Forker, who wrote on the American Meteor Society's website: "It's the brightest fireball I have seen in many years."
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Meteor

Meteor seen and heard over Nova Scotia, Canada

Greg Bennett
The Shelburne County Coast Guard
Mon, 13 Aug 2012 09:38 UTC
It's looking more and more like a meteor was the cause of a loud mysterious boom heard Sunday night by people across western Nova Scotia.

Several witnesses are describing an object with a fiery green tail that flew across the skyline. David Landry was in Dartmouth when he watched the bright object hurtle across the sky over the Halifax bridges and towards the west shortly after 11 a.m. [?]

He said the object was "much bigger and closer" than any meteorite he had ever seen before.

Moments later people in western Nova Scotia reported hearing the booms and seeing flashes of light.

Shortly after 11 p.m. people from Liverpool to Yarmouth County and beyond reported seeing flashes of light and hearing booms. Some reported hearing two booms, a large boom followed by a smaller boom.

Unlike a lightning bolt, this flashing bluish light was reported to last for more than 30 seconds and the "thunder" was heard and felt for more than 100 miles.
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Meteor

Meteorite hits moving car in Sioux City

Diana Johnsen
ABC 9 News
Sun, 12 Aug 2012 17:18 UTC
Around 11:15 p.m. last night, Steve Bell of Sioux City was in his car at a stop sign near Lakeport Commons when he heard a loud bang and glass break.

Immediately he thought it was a gunshot and took off.

He then parked in the Hy-Vee gas station near by and noticed a dent in the top of his car.

About fifteen minutes later he returned to the stop sign where the incident happened and was shocked by what he saw.
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Meteor

Blazing Meteor observed in Wenatchee, Washington

Mike Irwin
The Wenatchee World
Fri, 10 Aug 2012 08:26 UTC
Image
© Dean JohnsonWenatchee Valley, Washington State
East Wenatchee - Maybe you were out Tuesday for a late-evening stroll and gazed upward to admire the night's majestic spray of stars when ...

"It came flying out of the sky like a station wagon on fire," said Rick Throneberry, a Wenatchee resident who says he saw a fireball dropping from the cosmos "like something blew up and burned in flames all the way down."

Throneberry, who lives near the corner of Maple Street and Western Avenue, said he was standing in his yard chatting with his father about 10:15 p.m. Tuesday when he glanced to the northeast, toward Waterville, and saw the fireball falling, falling beyond the rim of Badger Mountain.

"It wasn't getting dimmer as it dropped," he said. "It was still in full flame when I lost sight of it behind Badger. I even waited ... thinking there might be an explosion. It never came."

Throneberry isn't alone. Another resident, this one in East Wenatchee, witnessed a blazing ball and, thinking it was a crashing plane, called the Douglas County Sheriff's Office.

"Let's see," said Sheriff Harvey Gjesdal, scrolling on Friday through official documents for the exactly the right report. "Airplane crash, nope. Bright lights, nope. Fireball from the sky, nope. I think I might need to call you back on this one."
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